Quotables

Quotables

His friends say he doesn't really mean anything by it. They are referring, of course, to Alfonse D'Amato's habit of behaving in public like a buffoon, frequently a nasty one.

D'Amato's friends, unfortunately, have had to issue their appeals for forbearance on a regular basis, because the New York senator seems to flip out at least several times a year. He curses, froths, uses the ``f'' word, speaks crudely to women and occasionally lapses into what he seems to regard as ethnic party jokes. All of this occurs in public settings. Heaven knows what he says and does in private.

FUND-RAISERS, NOT LAWMAKERS. Jack Valenti, former special assistant to President Johnson and president of the Motion Picture Association of America:

Consider this: A senator, if he or she is to wage an effective campaign the next election, must raise, on the average, about $30,000 every week of a six-year term. Emphasis on the word ``average,'' since a good many political professionals would count that figure to be quite low. ... The infection of money in politics is killing the fundamental concept of democracy.

It happens all the time. Shots are fired from nowhere, and no one fires them. But a child is hit, a child bleeds, sometimes a child dies. Wide-eyed, we shake our heads and grumble about the wretched turn the world has taken since we were kids. We pull our own children closer, but they blush and sputter and wriggle from our grasp. ...

We pray for our children as they rediscover the world and explore roads that take them farther away from us. We hope they don't take unnecessary chances, tumble from high places, fall in with the wrong crowd. We bundle them against spring breezes and stand by armed with bandages to cover the occasional ouch. And we can't help but worry about the mysteries, the strange forces that cause no one to fire bullets from nowhere. Three days ago, one of those ghostly bullets found Shanika Studmire.

But the sense of moral decline in the country has roots in realities that will not change just because Republicans are the majority in Congress. Republicans cannot alter the fact that fewer than one job in five pays enough today to support a family of four. Or the fact that millions of women with children - 60 percent of women with kids under 6, compared with 19 percent in 1960 - now work outside the home even though many of them would prefer not to. This, in turn, has drastically affected how children are raised and the ways values are transmitted to them. Goodbye afternoon homework, hello MTV.

The problems of welfare dependency, violent crime, drug addiction and illegitimacy are profound, but we would be wrong to suppose that society can be mended through better police work or tighter welfare requirements. Any major improvement will require that we mend, not just the walking wounded of the inner-cities, but ourselves.